This is a curious and a little bit of a complicated one, but follow me on this:

There’s a timber industry lawyer in Portland named Mark Rutzick. Before that he was a Bush administration official. And before that? A timber industry lawyer in Portland. Got the picture? OK, so far, so good.

Marbled Murrelet

Today environmentalists noted something that’s downright bizarre, at least to their legal eagles at Earthjustice: In a suit filed last month seeking to remove Endangered Species Act protections for the marbled murrelet, Rutzick cited draft regulations that the Bush administration hasn’t even released for public review yet. And when he was working as a special counsel at the National Marine Fisheries Service, he was focused on the Endangered Species Act, as we reported at the time.

Today enviros sent the D.C. court a motion to intervene and a motion to dismiss, the latter based on the fact that, well, this suit is based on regs that for now are just wishful Bush administration thinking. Here is press release by the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiffs.

The proposed regulations are the same ones we identified in a recent blog based on a Salon.com story. They would do serious harm to the act without actually consulting Congress, enviros charge.